How can we collectively support the emergence of different species of proximity and community within the field of expanded language-based practices: we-ness and near-ness; participation; observation; conversation; caring/curation; listening; hosting; guesting; audiencing; supporting; bearing witness; hearing out; feeding back; offering help; spending time; sharing time; sharing resources, world-building? How can we together support different modes of relationality and connectivity [gravitational pulls and resonant affinities] within the field of language-based practices, further ways for generating mutual support and resource?
Towards a more distributed, open organisation of the Special Interest Group within this community of practice through the evolution of live constellations of interest and focus within the field of language-based artistic research.
These various 'thematic nodes' present existing networks/research groups within the field of language-based artistic research, or have been initiated by individuals or by groups specifically for engaging with a specific thematic focus, a field of attraction and resonant affinity, or a matter of urgency.
Future invitations for further emergent thematics will be announced through the mailing list.
Some of the most recent thematic nodes can be found following this link here and will be added to this page shortly.
WITHING
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Delphine Chapuis Schmitz --- Emma Cocker --- Laressa Dickey --- Sabina Holzer --- Ines Marita Schärer --- Litó Walkey
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AUDIO: The audio recording comprises two 'readings' activated directly during our oneline zoom sessions: Part 1: (26.02.2024) Collective reading of a 'Breath Poem' generated from engaging with a score set by DCS anf LW; Part 2: (15.01.2024) Collective reading of the originating score (note: we have left the sound as it was in the live recording).
This is an emergent ‘thematic node’ for exploring the relation of languaging and bodying: How does languaging affect bodying? How does bodying affect languaging? How does movement inform wording? How does wording inform moving? How can we explore ways for languaging/bodying with, through and from sensing and somatic practices? How to find wording and worlding for the polyphonies of somatic experiences?
scores - notations - situations – conditions
Initiated through the mutual witnessing of shared resonances and affinities during Convocation II, we conceive this ‘node’ as an emergent framework for experimenting together, for sharing embodied practising, for testing possibilities for a bodily becoming of language/words. Since November 2023, our shared exploration unfolds through the rhythm of rotation, an evolving constellation of ‘pairings’ and ‘proposals’ based on a bi-monthly cycle. For each bi-monthly iteration, a pairing (two of us working together) devises a score/proposal/invitation/focus which we then all collectively test, enact, activate, reconnecting together after a period of practice for sharing materials / findings / discoveries / reflections from the shared research process.
Being in doing.
Being in practice together.
Body/Language.
Between the two, activating the between.
Moving
between different modalities,
shifting from one to the other.
Tilting towards.
Along-siding.
Asemic Writing and Reading
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Erika Tsimbrovsky, Mirte Hoogendoorn, Mariana Renthel, Cecilie Fang Jensen, and Antrianna Moutoula |
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We are a group of researchers interested in thinking together about the 'asemic' writing process, the materiality of language, extended writing techniques, and intermedial bodily presence in writing with a focus on its corporeal dimension. Some members of our group have developed particular relationships with the notion of asemic, and others have just begun to develop this relationality, which provokes generative conversations about how the concept of ‘asemic’ relates to our practices and why. This contemplation concerns the genealogy of the term and questions why the concept is relevant to our research inquiries today. One of the main inquiries in our sessions was the ambiguous nature of meaning-making in art and artistic research. In art research, we seek alternatives that might come with the ‘asemic’ and ‘eco-asemic’ materiality of language and awaken art/dance’s potential to meaningfully collaborate with surroundings. These explorations of language other than linguistic and grammatical aspects help to reimagine and redefine major concepts of living and ways of knowing. This artistic research enables art/dance potential to challenge existing conventions and institutional structures and create space for “unspoken texts” and “unheard voices”.
thinking aesthetic thinking
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Alex Arteaga | Emma Cocker
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This thematic node proposes to inquire into one specific variety of thinking: "aesthetic thinking". Based on previous investigations, this enquiry starts with the hypothesis that aesthetic thinking is enabled through an intensification of sensorimotor and emotional skills and a temporary neutralisation of will-based, target-oriented and logical-constructive actions. Furthermore, we believe that aesthetic thinking unfolds within emerging networks of non-hierarchically distributed agencies and does not produce or consolidate but rather destabilises meaning.
We intend to investigate how language-based artistic research practices may on the one hand trigger, sustain and nurture aesthetic thinking and, on the other hand, enable intuitive evidences of this variety of sense-making to appear. On this basis, we envisage to research as well the relationships between aesthetic thinking and discursive-propositional thinking, a hegemonic modality of meaning-making in the medium of language. We propose to carry on this research on the methodological basis of "ecologies of research practices in action": the mobilisation of connected, intertwined and hybridised practices in the medium of language. The collective activation of practices of reading, transcribing, translating, voicing, writing, distributing, printing, projecting, showing and sharing language in the form of "ecologies" is meant here to realise—meaning simultaneously fulfil and achieve insights—aesthetic thinking.
Voice/s Voicing
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Ruth Anderwald/Miriana Faieta/ Rob Flint/Bogdan Florea/ Ileana Gherghina/Cristiana de Marchi/Kai Ziegner |
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Whom or what do we give a voice? An essential part of our epistemological and methodological practices, voicing uses the instrument that living and non-living beings possess and links the materiality of the voice to its signifying aspects. Voices steer us, guide us, motivate or hinder us – be it the voice of an animal or fellow human, the inner voice as we get in our head, the artificial voice of a navigation system or digital assistant, the pleasurable murmur of wind and water; it can be the imagined voice, or an actor, filling a character with life, or a commentator interpreting events… Allure or warning, we coordinate the voices we encounter and orient accordingly. Moving away from screaming and leaning in to hear a whisper, we respond with somatic space positioning, different levels of appreciation, alertness, openness, and ensuing sense-making processes. How can we think about voice and language without resorting to a sound/sense hiatus? How is the voice related to its body, and how to explore the voice that has many bodies or the voice that has no body at all? The voicing of art and research has become a crucial point of reference and a daily practice.
Onomatopoetic Sound(e)scape – Slides and Slips between Sound and Speech
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Mariella Greil & Werner Moebius
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Onomatopoetic Sound(e)scape explores the interrelation of frequencies and investigates the acoustic phenomenon of slipping between abstract sound and concrete language. This dynamic audio-experience explores the double-meaning of the German noun Laut as the 'smallest acoustic-articulatory element’ in language and the adjective laut, as widely audible, strong in tone. Departing from Latin phænomenon, "that which appears, is brought to light, shows”, we focus on micro-phenomenological recounts of flourishing and weathering. These processes were at the methodical core of the Amaryllisation project, as we experiment with thresholding sound perceptions and emergent meanings. The laying bare of meaning making delves into the rich realm of onomatopoeia, the formation of words that imitate sounds and vice versa. The project aims to create a soundscape performing the subtle nuances and expressive potential of onomatopoetic elements. Lingering at the cusp of this research void is the main objective of our project. The fluid transitions between sound and speech blur boundaries, create subtle submergences of soundwords. Onomatopoetic Sound(e)scape not only celebrates the inherent musicality within language but also encourages to reflect on the connection between sound, expression, and communication. This project is a multisensory exploration, unearthing the expressive potential embedded in the onomatopoetic fabric of language.
SELF as OTHER - or: Speaking aut *
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Anna Nygren | Barb Macek
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We, Anna Nygren (AnnaN/annan) and Barb Macek (barb/brab), started an exchange of thoughts about the meaning of "aut" – as in aut/istic and aut/oimmune – that became the initial point for a collaborative project. We want to investigate what it means to live as auts, to write about it in regard to everyday life, in regard to the medical discourses about autism and autoimmunity, and in regard to the view of the "others", the not-auts.
Beyond that, as writers we are also interested in the aut/hor-ror – as something that disturbs within or next to the aut and makes it scary, but at the same time triggers something else, and thereby invites to a rethinking of aut/hor(ror)-ship.
In the context of language-based artistic research we seek to develop practices that allow for investigating the meaning of aut on different levels of our existence. Anna works with miss-spellings: with Spells, the magic spells and rituals of witches, the magic, dark and blooming – the spelling of wor(l)ds finding hidden things in miss-takes. As for the OTHER, Anna became AnnaN – "annan" in swedish means "other", indicating the hidden thing inside her that is unknown, the autistic, the mysterious.
Barb’s practice aims at a different understanding of an immune system that shows autoimmune activity – that treats the immunological SELF as the immunological OTHER, and asks for the meaning of this confusion, or dissolution, with the aid of poetical means, like chance and repetition.
By exchanging our experiences with being aut we try to explore new wor(l)ds, we experiment with transgressing borders (self – other / human – nonhuman / something – nothing / …) not only on the level of language but also on the pictorial and material level, and we warmly invite others to take part in this exchange.
* Speaking out and at the same time speaking as auts, but also speaking in a language called "aut"
LINK TO: RC-exposition in progress
CONTACT:
Text & Image Relations
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Beverley Carruthers | Wiebke Leister
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A thematic node that investigates contemporary modes of collaborative image-text-production, allowing for artistic, literary and methodological contributions.
Since 2015, our ‘Writing Photographs’ project has focused on how contemporary lens-based-media integrate text and writing in cross-disciplinary installations and performances. We are currently working with a research group under the heading 'The Expanded Librarian: Text+Image relations in post-photographic contexts and literary environments' at CRASSH Cambridge. As a new Thematic Node of the Language-based Artistic Research Group we would like to reach other to others working in the field of text&image relations for wider networking and sharing. Proposed online meeting every other month online, Fri 10-12 UK time, 11-13 EU time. If you are interested, please email us one page of A4 with a short description of an ongoing or new Text-Image project, including a few samples and a few lines how you would like to participate or what kind of collaborative format you would be interested in for such a thematic node.
CONTACTS:
b.carruthers@lcc.arts.ac.uk | wiebke.leister@rca.ac.uk
A_Collective_”I”
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Daisy Hildyard | Katrin Hahner | Rosie Heinrich| Sepideh Karami
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Drawing inspiration from and propelled by studies into the entanglements between new scientific research that challenges the concept of the bounded “individual”, the collapse of dominant orders and categorisations, and the hospicing of modernity/coloniality, this research project explores (visual / textual / polyvocal) expressions of the dissolution and abolition of the concept of the “individual”.
Lynn Margulis once said: in the arithmetic of life, one is always many. Marisol de la Cadena uses the phrasing: human… but not only. That we are multispecies symbiotic assemblages requires an unlearning of habitual grammars of thinking. Replete with excesses, extending beyond skin, fur, bark: binaries like “inside” / “outside” are troubled. Selves are plural, uncontained, decentered, and polyvocal. On the other hand, Trinh T. Minh-ha’s concept of “plural I” highlights the political aspect of the individual as standing out, taking position and responsibility: an “I” that can potentially stand for many without reducing it to the crowd.
Rooting into the foundations of modernity’s grammars that shape ways of relating, and pressing into language’s inherent evolution, this research project aims to advance a necessary unlearning in ways of relating to the world, ourselves as human-bodyings, and language itself. It attempts to do this through expanded reading/writing/listening/making practices (eg. developing notational scores; claying with words and voices): interrupting, disorienting and seeking openings that gesture towards other ways of relating and worlding.
Conversation-led, collaborative, decentralised, plurally shaped: the practice reflects the research, engaging fully with the phenomenon of being more-than one. With initial conversations among Daisy Hildyard, Katrin Hahner, Rosie Heinrich and Sepideh Karami, as this collective emerges it hopes to connect with potential (un)known voices through conversations, searching into what is not included in the singular narrative of colonial modernity.
Contact: rosie.a.heinrich@gmail
Encounters Write Choreography
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Kirsi Heimonen | Leena Rouhiainen
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We - Dance artists and artist-researchers Kirsi Heimonen and Leena Rouhiainen - are working on a novel approach to textual choreography that considers choreography as a form of site-specific choreo-writing. The objective of the choreographic processes is to allow the impact of the bodily sense of being in contact with different urban locations to permeate the authors’ activities in writing. To support this intention, we have generated a phenomenologically informed performative score on experimental writing that aims at appreciating the vitality of the sensuous. The overall aim of our work is to develop expanded forms of choreography that extend conventional choreography, namely dancers performing predesigned movement sequences, into the medium of writing. We likewise want to encourage anybody interested in movement and words to engage with choreography in the situations they find themselves in.
Contact information: kirsi.heimonen@uniarts.fi and leena.rouhiainen@uniarts.fi
Image: Writing as choreography. Photo: screen shot from short-film Writing the Shadow as Choreography (Concept, text and speech: Kirsi Heimonen and Leena Rouhiainen, filming and editing Raimo Uunila, sound design Antti Nykyri)
Collective writing in public space
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Initiated by Lena Séraphin with Emma Cocker | Andrea Coyotzi Borja| Cordula Daus | Vidha Saumya.
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What other ways for perceiving and reimagining public space emerge in and through language? In turn, how does writing in a public space shape and inform the emergent possibilities of language, alongside the felt sense of subjectivity for both writers and readers? How are shared spaces constructed in/by/with text? What worlds become “opened up by the words”, by “the space of the text”?
Inspired by the writings of Georges Perec - and his book An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris that acknowledges overlooked phenomena in a Parisian square in 1974 - this ongoing enquiry engages with different public spaces as ever-changing phenomena, writing and rewriting site and situatedness through the lens of different prompts and scores. In one sense, the project explores ways for intervening in, disrupting or unsettling the homogeneity of civic consumerism and the commercialisation of urban common space, as well as operating as a countertext to the commodification of our bodily selves, through the gentle act of focused attention and through languaging the space otherwise. Collective writing in public space invites a multitude of intertwining writerly perspectives through observational writing underpinned by bodily awareness, perception and sensations, moving away from solitary writing towards collective and multilingual writing. Writing is understood in a broad sense, extending beyond alphabets into the interweaving of movements, presences and actions in public space, posing questions on how we communicate and have an impact on each other when traversing public sites. Through the writing and reading of texts generated in touch with public space, this enquiry redefines the solitary act of writing, introducing collective live-writing in public space as an artistic-literary genre.
Contact: lena.seraphin@uniarts.fi
Performing Passages
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Kris Pint | Nadia Sels | Goda Palekaitė | Maria Gil Ulldemolins
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Passage is a transdisciplinary research line based in Hasselt University, Belgium. We understand autotheory and other hybrid and performative forms of creative-critical writing as connective methodologies in artistic research. We use text as a tool to bring together different genres of knowledge, from critical theory, to embodied experience, pop culture, or unconscious fixations. Writing becomes a space where unexpected meetings can take place: different media, epochs, cultures, registers, languages. We think of provoking these encounters as a practice in itself. This practice is many-headed: artistic and theoretical, yes, but also architectural and embodied; conglomerated, subjective, and often, anachronistic. For us, it is a way to seek new forms of defining and dwelling in both our inner and outer environments.
We can be found at projectpassage.net, where we also publish a peer-reviewed journal for other academics, writers, architects, and artists that use these methodologies.
Image: Kris Pint. 2022. 'Hunters in the snow'.
The un|common ground
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Regina Dürig | Marinos Koutsomichalis | Phoenix Savage,| Anna T.
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How to carefully catch the words | τι λατσά που μαζευτήκαμε εδώ να παίξουμε | black on crisp white | su quella tristeza transcendente | ka ji ni kutukutu | eu estou aqui para vocês | das Gleißen des Gefieders, der Gedanken, der Geduld | emi ti ji ni kutukutu, mo ti mohun ipin ko’pin
Our individual research areas overlap in decolonial, non-western, and off-center language-informed/language-driven and poetic practices. How do languages embed, implement, and help establish colonial regimes and how may these be challenged and resisted through language? How can we use language to creatively articulate decolonial concerns? Can language become some kind of sanctuary? A hiding place wherein borderland and non-dominant (micro-)cultures may dwell and thrive? How can non-western languages and off-center references set out new directions for artistic research and practices? What happens when such off-centered – strictly non-western, non-dominant, queer or feminist – local points of reference intersect and inform one another? What is the relationship between language (embodied, oral, and written) and community-forming, ununderstandability, untranslatability, and opacity? We reflect on these and other questions against the backdrop of our research practices and poetic/literary projects.
Contact: Marinos Koutsomichalis <marinos@marinoskoutsomichalis.com>
Words as Matter
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Mariana Renthel | Anouk Hoogendoorn
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Words as Matter - alchemical operations on words would like to become a constant conversation and exploration open to whomever would like to join and co-explore: namely implementing actions that trigger exploration in the simple, yet interesting realm of using words as matter(ial). Understanding that through word quality recognition one could give place to so-called “alchemical operations'' such as the possibility of flexibility in shape and etymology of words by: dissection, merging, malleability, trans-lingua and in-betweens. In that sense, speculations are also welcome as a strategy to be used mainly, while inhabiting the creation process.
The affinities between perception, writing as graphism or drawing and the opportunities to implement those operations on wording could further on understanding and poetic capabilities as an artistic practice, methodologies or strategies.
Contacts:
mariana.renthel@udea.edu.co or marianrenthel@gmail.com
anoukhoogendoorn@hotmail.com or info@anoukhoogendoorn.com
Writing as research as writing
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Marjolijn van den Berg | Nirav Christophe | Daniela Moosmann | Ninke Overbeek
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We are a research group within the Professorship Performative Processes of HKU Utrecht University of the Art. We explore the ways in which both artistic research and artistic practice can be disseminated in and through writing.
The production processes of writing and researching have become more and more intertwined; the research and the work exist in dialogue with each other.
The researchgroup works along five lines of inquiry:
* Creative writing techniques being used as a method of artistic research;
* Alternative writing techniques in BA-, MA- and PhD-thesises in Higher Art Education;
* Knowledge on writing processes informing artistic research methologies;
* Writing practice and artistic research seen as collective and co-creative activities;
* Research and writing pedagogies in Higher Art Education.
Where they all meet is the idea of writing as research as writing.
Key words: Peer writing, Polyphony, Ficto/critical Strategies, Enquiry through writing; Creative Writing Pedagogies, Co-creation, Dissemination of Artistic Research.
More on the research can be seen in here and here
We would like to actively invite people to join us in our research, by adding to our collective writing sessions. For example, we would like to invite you to add your own voices and bodies to the text shown in the collaborative writing video: tinyurl.com/4x35ds37
Contact: marjolijn.vandenberg@hku.nl
The inquiry focuses on the relationship of language based practices and the construction, withholding and disturbance of meaning making, as it proceeds through personal artistic explorations - articulating solitudes. Thus far this is being explored through the practice of considering language as something becoming image and vice versa in and through Dutton’s artistic practice and through the application of Mers’ Diagrammatic Instruments which are the construct at the center, and quite literally the 'middle term' of her artistic practice of Performative Diagrammatics - articulating solitudes together. What develops, amongst other things, is an ongoing dialogue around the nature of intention, interpretation, when to speak and when to be silent, and the work of art as finding its form by perpetually performing itself. Discourses that intersect with our inquiry are Aesthetics and Epistemology, Cognitive Linguistics, Philosophy of Language, Performance Philosophy, and New Materialist Philosophy, along with ecological inquiries across social justice, gender and organization studies. We are interested in curating, facilitation, dramaturgy and performance. Others are welcome and the focus of the group is flexible and expansive. Please email us, including ‘Articulating Solitudes’ in the subject line.
Contact: adelheidmers@gmail.com, duttonstudio@gmail.com
Articulating Solitudes
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Adelheid Mers | Steve Dutton
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Unspeakable Dialogues: Narratives for the Anthropocene
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Rachel Armstrong | Breg Horemans | Rolf Hughes | Virginia Tassinari
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Recognising that many disciplines do not understand each other and are therefore incapable of genuine or meaningful dialogues (and therefore potential innovation), we define Unspeakable Dialogues as the absence of common understanding between disciplines. This is not simply a lack of (academic) language, but (with art, design and architecture offering artistic, performative and embodied ways of expanding our nodes of understanding) concerns rather an expansion of literacy. Unspeakable Dialogues accordingly develops a set of knowledge instruments that that help us reconceive research from a post Anthropocene perspective. It prepares us for holding new conversations about how we live, communicate and creatively engage our world, and so alter the impact of human development towards a life-promoting culture. The interdisciplinary research arising from such dialogues will involve an expanded notion of dialogue as the site not merely for consensual interpretation (by setting contested concepts against each other and exploring the ‘third’ – hermeneutic – space that results, as in the established, but still under-explored, genre of the philosophical dialogue), but also as a methodological frame, or disciplinary interface, for confronting viewpoints, disciplinary logics and values that have been neglected by modern science and Western-centric, anthropocentric models of knowledge. It facilitates new insights into the challenges of interdisciplinary research by incorporating hitherto repressed ways of knowing (sensory, bodily, spiritual, experiential, emotional, tacit, ineffable, but also non-human or “more-than human” forms of knowing). It explores a more performative, embodied idea of unspeakable dialogues by questioning the current Western-centric epistemological paradigm, engaging in new forms of experimental knowledge creation, able to embrace relationality and care, through artistic and design research.
Contact: rolf.hughes@kuleuven.be
